Update on MonoDevelop Linux releases

Once upon a time, mono-project.com had two package repositories – one for RPM files, one for Deb files. This, as it turned out, was untenable – just building on an old distribution was insufficient to offer “works on everything” packages, due to dependent library APIs not being necessarily forward-compatible. For example, openSUSE users could not install MonoDevelop, because the versions of libgcrypt, libssl, and libcurl on their systems were simply incompatible with those on CentOS 7. MonoDevelop packages were essentially abandoned as unmaintainable.

Then, nearly 2 years ago, a reprieve – a trend towards development of cross-distribution packaging systems made it viable to offer MonoDevelop in a form which did not care about openSUSE or CentOS or Ubuntu or Debian having incompatible libraries. A release was made using Flatpak (born xdg-app). And whilst this solved a host of distribution problems, it introduced new usability problems. Flatpak means sandboxing, and without explicit support for sandbox escape at the appropriate moment, users would be faced with a different experience than the one they expected (e.g. not being able to P/Invoke libraries in /usr/lib, as the sandbox’s /usr/lib is different).

In 2 years of on-off development (mostly off – I have a lot of responsibilities and this was low priority), I wasn’t able to add enough sandbox awareness to the core of MonoDevelop to make the experience inside the sandbox feel as natural as the experience outside it. The only community contribution to make the process easier was this pull request against DBus#, which helped me make a series of improvements, but not at a sufficient rate to make a “fully Sandbox-capable” version any time soon.

In the interim between giving up on MonoDevelop packages and now, I built infrastructure within our CI system for building and publishing packages targeting multiple distributions (not the multi-distribution packages of yesteryear). And so to today, when recent MonoDevelop .debs and .rpms are or will imminently be available in our Preview repositories. Yes it’s fully installed in /usr, no sandboxing. You can run it as root if that’s your deal.

MonoDevelop 7.4.0.1026 on CentOS 6

Where’s the ARM builds?

https://github.com/mono/monodevelop/pull/3923

Where’s the ARM64 builds?

https://github.com/ericsink/SQLitePCL.raw/issues/199

Why aren’t you offering builds for $DISTRIBUTION?

It’s already an inordinate amount of work to support the 10(!) distributions I already do. Especially when, due to an SSL state engine bug in all versions of Mono prior to 5.12, nuget restore in the MonoDevelop project fails about 40% of the time. With 12 (currently) builds running concurrently, the likelihood of a successful publication of a known-good release is about 0.2%. I’m on build attempt 34 since my last packaging fix, at time of writing.

Can this go into my distribution now?

Oh God no. make dist should generate tarballs which at least work now, but they’re very much not distribution-quality. See here.

What about Xamarin Studio/Visual Studio for Mac for Linux?

Probably dead, for now. Not that it ever existed, of course. *cough*. But if it did exist, a major point of concern for making something capital-S-Supportable (VS Enterprise is about six thousand dollars) is being able to offer a trustworthy, integration-tested product. There are hundreds of lines of patches applied to “the stack” in Mac releases of Visual Studio for Mac, Xamarin.Whatever, and Mono. Hundreds to Gtk+2 alone. How can we charge people money for a product which might glitch randomly because the version of Gtk+2 in the user’s distribution behaves weirdly in some circumstances? If we can’t control the stack, we can’t integration test, and if we can’t integration test, we can’t make a capital-P Product. The frustrating part of it all is that the usability issues of MonoDevelop in a sandbox don’t apply to the project types used by Xamarin Studio/VSfM developers. Android development end-to-end works fine. Better than Mac/Windows in some cases, in fact (e.g. virtualization on AMD processors). But because making Gtk#2 apps sucks in MonoDevelop, users aren’t interested. And without community buy-in on MonoDevelop, there’s just no scope for making MonoDevelop-plus-proprietary-bits.

Why does the web stuff not work?

WebkitGtk dropped support for Gtk+2 years ago. It worked in Flatpak MonoDevelop because we built an old WebkitGtk, for use by widgets.

Aren’t distributions talking about getting rid of Gtk+2?

Yes 😬

5 Responses to “Update on MonoDevelop Linux releases”

  1. So, snaps have the option of “classic” confinement, which is not confined at all – they have full filesystem access, no syscall restrictions, and so on. It’s basically just an application bundle. Relevant to MonoDevelop, JetBrains is now trialling distributing CLion and IntelliJ as “classic” snaps.

    While flatpak doesn’t have a direct “turn off all the confinement” option, you can punch a bunch of holes, including getting full filesystem access. I don’t know if you can specify that in the manifest, but if you can would it make sense to do that for the flatpak distribution?

  2. You can punch through any path… except /usr

  3. Well that is very precisely useless!

    It shouldn’t be *too* hard to translate from flatpak build instructions to snapcraft build instructions. I’ll push that on the “have a look” stack…

  4. Since version 0.10.1 flatpak can expose the host’s /usr and /etc directory to /run/host/ in the sandbox. But that’s probably not enough to enable interop with host libraries. I guess there would need to be changes to the library search path and possibly some other changes.

  5. The concept of loading host libs is just broken and defeats the entire idea of being a portable package.

    Now there are still ways of running things on the host (which directhex is well aware of) and GNOME-Builder is a great example of handling this.

    The problem is it is you can’t just enable that and requires the IDE be designed around the concept of the IDE environment != the runtime environment.

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